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Oops, I’ve lost count, and yesterday’s predictions by Noah Zerkin were part 6 of our ongoing series. Which means today is part 7, and I’m delighted to say we have Gene Becker with us today. Gene is a veteran in the field of ubiquitus computing and the founder of Lightning Laboratories a consulting company focusing on AR, ubicomp and social media. He also writes at The Connected World and on Twitter. Again, Gene sent me his predictions just days before Google Goggles became public.

Mobile AR will get a popularity boost when Groundspeak supports virtual AR caches in its Geocaching iPhone app.

The most active category of mobile AR apps will be multiplayer real-world games (MMARGs???) and at least one major global brand campaign will be built around an AR-based ARG (remember Halo 2 and ilovebees?).

Commercial AR will continue to be dominated by startups and small companies. The giant companies will make a lot of noise and attend lots of conferences, but won’t really ship anything interesting. However, one of the biggies (Nokia or Google) may well acquire a mobile AR startup with leading market presence or IP position.

2010 will be a great year for AR-based art, with the highlight being an extravagant audio & graphic AR piece by Banksy overlaid on the city of Bristol, England.

Open AR services that allow user-generated augments will struggle with a plague of spARm, porn, and abuse of corporate brands.

The first legal dispute over physical/virtual property rights will arise due to an offensive AR posting above a commercial location. The courts will struggle to comprehend.

We will finally stop worrying about whether an app is “really AR”, and embrace location & context-aware audio, physical hyperlinks, GPS+compass local search etc as all part of our big happy connected world AR family.

There won’t be any AR sunglasses, sorry kids.

I for one am really waiting for the Banksy’s AR piece, and will be here to cover live the first AR related legal dispute. What are you looking for in the coming year?

2 Responses

Interesting set.
Especially the dispute over virtual property rights.
I can certainly see some companys campaigning against virtual graffiti written above them.

Probably comes down to sueing someone for slander though, as I dont think theres much legal grounds to critised data tagged with your location. You might own the land, but no one owns those sets of co-ordinates.